


Palindrome

by My_Bated_Breath



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt And Some Comfort, Kataang - Freeform, Post-War, Reverse Chronology, Why sleep when you can write, Zutara, a dash of prose, a second chance to draw forth pain, a second chapter, first and second chapter are companion pieces, i mean this is part of the zutara drabble angst challenge after all, why did it take hours to write 500 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26420476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Bated_Breath/pseuds/My_Bated_Breath
Summary: Love has no name.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 68
Collections: Zutara Angst Challenge





	1. He

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the impromptu Zutara Angst Drabble challenge because why write for my other WIPs when my sleep-deprived self can stay up to 3 AM procrastinating/writing a drabble?
> 
> Anyways, enjoy :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for the impromptu Zutara Angst Drabble challenge because why write for my other WIPs when my sleep-deprived self can stay up to 3 AM procrastinating/writing a drabble?
> 
> Anyways, enjoy :)

3.

She meets him on the balcony.

The new world is clothed in color. The artist paints grasses spilling from the earth, sunrise streaking across the sky. The artist paints green swathing her shoulders and arms, pink adorning hair and cheeks.

The new world is spun in destiny. The poet writes children playing on the streets, little soldier boys returning home. The poet writes the beauty aligned in her stride, the knowing dawning on her gaze.

This is the moment they have been waiting for, peace and harmony and love and forever. This is what they will remember.

The new world is just the two of them.

Aang and Katara.

Embracing.

Kissing.

( _Loving_.)

From where he is leaning against the door, Zuko turns away.

2.

“How do I say something I can’t even understand? How do I know how I feel?”

Iroh sips his tea slowly. Further along the room, a full cup cools on an empty table.

“There is no knowing, Nephew,” his uncle says, bittersweet, with wonder, with sorrow. “There is only living.”

1.

Their hands touch when he passes the teacup.

Steam rises from amber, clouding her cheeks, lips, eyes. But when their fingertips brush he feels a spark that shocks him into clarity, racing through his veins, trembling in his bones. His chest burns, aching breathlessly, and he wonders if he has yet to heal or if he burns for her; he always burns for her.

( _"Katara, I-”_

_He wants to tell her, but he doesn’t know how.)_

He’s silent, and so is she.

2.

“Katara, I-”

An impulse is thrumming in his throat and slipping onto his tongue, but it tells him nothing of what shape his lips should speak in.

“I don’t know what to say.”

When she grasps onto his hand tight, he’s reminded of where else her hands had been. Arms. Chest. Scars.

( _Heart._ )

She smiles.

“Then you don’t have to say anything at all.”

3.

She meets him on the balcony.

The in-between world is drowning in red. The ground is red, the sky is red, their blood is red. Red is in the exertion on her cheeks, in the rim around her eyes. There are no artists to paint her while she’s shattered.

The in-between world is breaking illusions. The former Fire Lord is screaming, the almost Fire Lord is hurting, and the Avatar is an ocean away. There are no poets to write her while she is a doubt.

Nothing in this moment is a legacy. Nothing will be remembered.

( _With it comes relief._ )

Together, they stare out at a horizon that cannot be defined. The distance between their hands cannot be defined either, not by measurements or breaths or heartbeats. And he finds himself anchored in simplicity even as feelings twist in the abstract. And she is abstract too, in her fraying clothing and fatigued stance. She is tangible too, in lost eyes and wandering identities.

The in-between world is just the two of them.

Zuko and Katara.


	2. She

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For clarification, I wrote this chapter with the intention that you read it through as though you were watching the ATLA finale played backwards, so hopefully that clears some confusion.

Her eyes flutter open.

The third kiss counts back to the second. Pressure between lips falls gently like feathers. Faces draw back, gray returning into perspective. His wide-eyed gaze encompasses her.

Before her the world suspends a space before eternity. This was a memory before it will be a legacy, but their descendants no longer dwell on uncertainties. Instead, they memorize how to weave the fabric she dons and how to grow the flower she wears; they recite the color of the dye and the color of the sky.

For the future there’s no tracing back, no heads tilting upright and arms loosening from necks, no distance measured except the one forward. But she sees heavens warming away the night, almost sees burned-away red gasping on the choking canvas.

From its crumpled, withered remains, the last “what-if” blooms in her mind.

Legs step back. The city disappears from view. The Avatar disappears from view.

(She doesn’t realize it, but _he_ is walking alongside her, behind her, in front of her, wracked with the inexplicable — doubts and hopes and a little wisdom from his Uncle and a feeling he cannot name.)

_(His heart swells because she has yet to break it.)_

Ba Sing Se narrows, broadens into one piece. In a small tea shop, she contemplates swallowing ginseng over swallowing her destiny.

Time hangs still for it, for her last unintentional act before she acts out a predetermined play — fingers reaching out, heat from his hands so much softer than heat from the tea. His eyes are gold, but they are more. Pulling close, closer, enough to grant her longer to wonder.

He stays.

She lingers.

(It’s fleeting, but it grasps her. She doesn’t think to grasp back.)

Then, she considers a moment before it is suffocated by a forever. She considers many moments until they never happened, present unraveling into past — sky bison’s flight reversed to the Fire Nation, golden flame unpinned from a top-knot, palace doors closing on the victorious hero and defeated villain.

But these are not the ones that matter.

No, it is in the ghost-palace that life takes shape, where they lose soft smiles and quiet laughs and hesitant touches, where they lose bitter relief in war’s end and dread-filled hope in peace’s beginning — she loses her faith as his heartbeat weakens under a fading blue glow — he loses blood, the starburst scar painting his chest reopening in charred crimson brushstrokes — time loses order when she paces, waits, asks herself why she never thought to heal his wounds before, the tiny cuts and bruises he shrugged off and she accepted because her palms still remembered the roughness of his cheek — feeling are lost entirely as they drag themselves back into the courtyard, into death’s embrace — he is alive but his breaths, his murmurs of thank you, Katara, die in his mouth — and his eyes, gold but more, close.

In her arms, he has yet to realize consciousness.

In her heart, she has yet to realize why.


End file.
